Experiencing Dylan: The Effect of Formal Structure and Performance on the Popularity and Interpretation of Two Dylan Songs

What makes a song popular? The following chapter wishes to shed light on this question by scrutinizing several formal features of popular music which were hypothesized to affect the popularity of a song in specific ways. Therefore, I have tested the effect of formal irregularities and amplification on the appreciation and the interpretation of two Bob Dylan songs in a small natural experiment (an analysis of various renditions available through YouTube) as well as a listening experiment with 237 participants. The natural experiment, based on renditions of both songs, showed that formal irregularities tend to get regularized over time, even if they can be interpreted as semantically meaningful. This tendency also indicates that when regularization occurs the original irregularities are neither recognized nor interpreted as meaningful. In the online listening experiment participants heard one of seven versions of Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (the original recording, two edits of it, and four cover versions), and rated a set of Likert-scale items concerning the way the song was experienced by the listener. The results showed that, in line with my hypotheses, irregular and acoustic versions tend to evoke more negative feelings, as they enhance attention and appreciation for the lyrics and, thus, support interpretations which are in line with these lyrics. At the same time, however, regularized and amplified song versions, again as expected, turned out to induce positive feelings, an appreciation for the song as a whole and less attention to the lyrics. Consequently, the latter song versions, lead to interpretations which are at odds with large parts of the lyrics.